Show: ALL IN with CHRIS HAYESDate: March 4, 2015Guest: William Yeomans, Nina Totenberg

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CHRIS HAYES, MSNBC HOST (voice-over): Tonight on ALL IN --

ERIC HOLDER, ATTORNEY GENERAL: Some of those protesters were right.

HAYES: The Department of Justice report on Ferguson is out.

HOLDER: It is time for Ferguson`s leaders to take immediate, wholesale, constructual corrective action.

HAYES: Tonight, inside the federal government`s jaw-dropping finding of systematic discrimination in an American city.

Then, it`s like 1998 all over again.

HILLARY CLINTON, FORMER SECRETARY OF THE STATE: Why would I ever want to do email?

HAYES: The latest on the Clinton e-mail mess.

Plus, it`s like 2000 all over again.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It does appear to be a 5-4 opinion.

HAYES: Why today`s Supreme Court Obamacare arguments could be the most important since Bush v. Gore.

And it`s like 2003 all over again.

GEORGE W. BUSH, FORMER PRESIDENT: The security of the world requires disarming Saddam Hussein now.

HAYES: Why Americans are increasingly buying another war in Iraq.

ALL IN starts right now.

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HAYES: Good evening from New York. I`m Chris Hayes.

And we begin with breaking news out of Missouri tonight, where the city of Ferguson just fired one city official and put two others on administrative leave and under internal investigation after a scathing new report from the Department of Justice turned up racist e-mails.

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MAYOR JAMES KNOWLES, FERGUSON, MISSOURI: Today`s report allows the city of Ferguson to identify the problems, not only in our police department, but in the entire St. Louis region.

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HAYES: That report was one of two released this morning by the Justice Department. One document looked at the shooting death of Michael Brown in which the DOJ decided not to charge Darren Wilson with violating the civil rights of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Wilson shot and killed Brown, who was unarmed, back on August 9th of last year.

That report said, quote, "Although no eyewitnesses corroborate Wilson`s account of Brown`s attempt to gain control of the gun, there is no credible evidence to disprove Wilson`s account of what occurred inside the SUV. And there is no evidence upon which prosecutors can rely to disprove Wilson`s stated subjective belief that he feared for his safety."

Although Wilson was not charged, a second DOJ report on the Ferguson Police Department was scathing. And led to an incredible scene in Washington, D.C., today, as the first black U.S. attorney general in the history of the nation came before a microphone and described a police department that has been running for years essentially an unconstitutional racket on the black residents of Ferguson, Missouri -- a racket to extract revenue, to harass them and intimidate them, and in many cases ruin their lives.

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HOLDER: This investigation found a community that was deeply polarized -- a community where deep distrust and hostility often characterized interactions between police and area residents, a community where local authorities consistently approached law enforcement, not as a means for protecting public safety, but as a way to generate revenue.

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HAYES: This emphasis on extracting revenue through policing sometimes led to multiple arrests, even jail time.

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HOLDER: In 2007, one woman received two parking tickets that together totaled $152. To date, she`s paid $550 in fines, and fees, to the city of Ferguson. She has been arrested twice for having unpaid tickets. And she has spent six days in jail.

Yet today, she`s still inexplicably owing Ferguson $541. And her story is only one of dozens of similar accounts that our investigation uncovered.

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HAYES: The full 105-page Justice Department investigation which was released today also said that violating residents` constitutional rights had become somewhat routine. One example came in the summer of 2012, a 32-year-old African-American man sat in his car cooling off after playing basketball in a Ferguson public park. An officer pulled up behind the man`s car, blocking him in and demanded the man`s Social Security number and identification.

Holder told this story today as the Ferguson police violating the Constitution and the basic dignity of the people they are sworn to protect.

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HOLDER: The officer proceeded to accuse the man of being a pedophile. He prohibited the man from using his cell phone and ordered him to get out of his car for a pat-down search, even though he had no reason to suspect that the man was armed. And when the man objected, citing his constitutional rights, the police officer drew his service weapon, pointed it at the man`s head, and arrested him on eight different counts. Now, this arrest caused the man to lose his job.

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HAYES: What Eric Holder did today was give voice with a full authority of the government and the resources of the state to the complaint I heard time and time again, day after day, from nearly every single black person I talked to during my time in Ferguson.

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HAYES: Do you feel like you all have a story about an interaction with a cop that made you want to come out here tonight? You all feel that way? And how routine is that?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A firefighter in my school allowed us to stand on a truck. A police officer walked up with his gun drawn, yelling at us, telling us to get off of the truck.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The police force, there`s three African-Americans and 50 Caucasian Americans. We can`t have a situation like that. The amount of citations, and stops.

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HAYES: It got to a point when I was down there last year, as a white guy coming from New York, that I thought maybe I was starting to lose my mind, that I was losing my hold on reality. Could it actually be as bad as it was being described?

And the answer is yes. Yes, it is. This is the reality. It`s the reality of the Justice Department investigators, encountered over and over again.

And today, the most powerful law enforcement officer in the country reinforced what Ferguson`s black residents had been saying all along.

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HOLDER: Of course, violence is never justified. But seen in this context, amid a highly toxic environment, defined by mistrust and resentment, stoked by years of bad feelings and spurred by illegal and misguided practices, it`s not difficult to imagine how a single tragic incident set off the city of Ferguson like a powder keg.

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HAYES: Joining me now, Trymaine Lee, national reporter for MSNBC. This is quite a document.

TRYMAINE LEE, MSNBC NATIONAL REPORTER: To say that this report is blistering would be faint. As I mentioned, spending time on the ground there in Ferguson, talking to folks, they have all these stories about how bad it is. And this actually illustrates that it`s actually worse than almost you could actually understand.

HAYES: It`s like the most radical voices in the street, being like, this is a -- you cannot imagine what`s happening down here. Now, the Department of Justice, with their crest and seal on the front, 105 pages, we looked into it, and yes.

LEE: Even the summary release that happened yesterday, we see the actual percentage of folks stopped. Black folks 67 percent of the city but 93 percent of stops, and so on. When you read the anecdotes of the man who was playing basketball, he ended up with a gun to his head, gets arrested, loses his job, a woman who had been arrested and spent six days in jail, a normal person, this is every day. It`s purely being African-American puts you in danger.

HAYES: That guy, the story he told, the most infuriating detail is the guy is cooling off after playing basketball, cop comes up on him, demands, he ends up citing him for I think 11 violations, one being that he gave false information, because he said his name was Mike, when it was Michael.

LEE: Ridiculous.

And accused the guy of being pedophile, and when a guy say, you know, tried to express his constitutional rights, that`s when the gun is pointed at his head.

I mean, so when we look at these numbers is bad, but to actually have the attorney general of the United States laying it out, it was scathing. I said earlier it was almost like if there was ever a come to Jesus moment for any law enforcement agency in the country, it`s this one. But as protesters said and folks I talked to this afternoon said, the problem is, you walk three blocks north, you`re in another municipality that looks and behaves just like Ferguson. Go to the south and it`s the same thing.

HAYES: One more item on this report I want to take a second with. The use of dogs, there`s an obvious resonance here historically. Use of dogs by Ferguson police appears to have been exclusively reserved for African-Americans in every case, in which Ferguson police records record the race of the person bit by a police dog, bit by a police dog, that person was African-American.

LEE: Made worse not only by the history, but the manner in which they seem to be approaching and targeting African-Americans from this report. We`re seeing so this indiscriminate, by simply your manner of walking.

HAYES: Yes, let`s look at this -- this is the 85 percent of all traffics -- 67 percent of the residents are African-American, 85 percent of all traffic stops, 88 percent of cases in which police use force, 90 percent of all citations, 93 percent of all arrests. In the court system, this is the other thing, that the court system just sits there to process people, watch them miss court dates and then have the money pile up so they are in reverse arrears --

LEE: Right.

HAYES: -- to the municipality.

LEE: They`re all complicit in that they were actually using the arrests and fines of the African-Americans to buoy the revenue of the municipality. In fact, black folks were 68 percent likely to have their charges dismissed.

So meanwhile in the same report, the police are doing whatever they can to pull the strings for their own friends and family.

HAYES: That`s another part of that, right?

LEE: Exactly.

HAYES: Favor trading, making sure people got favorable treatment if they knew the right people.

LEE: That`s right.

HAYES: You also have -- OK. So this comes out. You get Mayor James Knowles, and he says, we`re going to -- he refers to the four racist e-mails that were found, incredibly disgusting e-mails. One person`s fired, two on administrative leave.

And then he basically says, we hired some -- we hired a few black people, we`re going to do diversity training. Not a word about whether they`re going to cooperate with what the Department of Justice has in store for them. What was your reaction to Knowles?

LEE: I`m waiting for him to stand up and say, we have to change everything we`ve been doing.

HAYES: Root and branch.

LEE: Top to bottom, because there are deep systemic, there are real problems here.

But instead, it was so vague. He said we hired a few corrections officers. She was African-American. We hired two court reporters, whoever they are, who are African-Americans. There`s this program, that program.

HAYES: The idea that you would look at this -- at this report and say, we have hired two black court reporters.

LEE: That`s it. No questions.

It might be telling, who knows at this point, we didn`t hear from Chief Tom Jackson. Now, of course, do you want to put him up there and have darts thrown at him, but still, the chief of police is going to say, I stand by my guys?

HAYES: Does he keep his job? And elections coming up in April 7th. That`s something we will be looking at on this program.

Trymaine Lee, thank you very much.

LEE: Thank you.

HAYES: All right. Joining me now, former deputy assistant attorney general and acting assistant attorney general for the civil rights division at the Department of Justice, William Yeomans.

You worked in the division that wrote this report. And I`m curious as someone who was there for, I think, 20, 25 years, something like that, your reaction in this report terms of where it stacks up. It read to me incredibly forceful. I`m curious to hear your response.

WILLIAM YEOMANS, FORMER ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL, DOJ CIVIL RIGHTS DIVISION: Well, Chris, I think it`s a stunning report. It`s breathtaking. The detail that is contained in those 100 pages, it`s just -- it`s a blueprint for bad policing, racially biased policing, for a police department that has completely lost its sense of mission.

And as you pointed out, became more of a revenue raising institution than an institution designed to protect the public safety. So the department, I think, here now has its work cut out for it in ensuring that Ferguson implements the 26 recommendations that are contained in the report. And they are recommendations that cut to the core of the Ferguson Police Department, if they are implemented.

And I think many of them will be implemented, they will completely restructure the department, change the culture of the department, and focus much more on community policing and far less on raising revenue.

HAYES: Let me ask you about the other part of the news today, which is the Department of Justice sort of officially clearing Darren Wilson on federal civil rights charges. We said from the beginning as we were following it, that`s going to be a hard case to make.

That said, I mean, the Feds did come in in the wake of Rodney King and the acquittal of those officers and they did successfully get federal charges, I believe convictions, against those police officers, on violating federal civil rights.

What is your reaction to that decision based on what you know, based on reading the report from the DOJ today?

YEOMANS: Well, I think those of us who are experienced prosecutors in this area have known from the start that this would be a very difficult case in which to bring federal charges. You know, in Rodney King, one of the big differences was that there was a videotape that actually showed the violence, that actually showed the police officers hitting and kicking and beating Rodney King with batons.

In this case, the -- we didn`t have that. And the facts were very much more in dispute. But it`s also, I think, the case that it is much more likely that there will be charges in the beating case than in a shooting case. Police shootings very rarely end up in prosecutions.

But I think the overall point that needs to be made is the federal standard is extremely difficult. And I think we`ve heard a lot about that while this investigation has been pending. But when people look for the various institutional reasons why there isn`t a prosecution here, they really shouldn`t look much farther than the legal standard.

HAYES: So, we`ve talked about the particularities of Ferguson, and not just Ferguson, but Jennings and other parts of county and other parts of Metro St. Louis. As someone who worked in the department, and a department that does this, reliably -- we saw the report from Cleveland -- it will look at patterns and practices of local police departments, I guess my question to you is, if you threw a dart at the municipality police departments across this country, you know, what would you find?

YEOMANS: Well, I think you would find a lot of disparity. So, unfortunately, I think there are a number of other police departments out there, like Ferguson, that are really rife for intervention. Of course, the Department of Justice has limited resources.

There`s something like 18,000 police departments in the country. So, it is not going to get to all of them. But I think it`s extremely important to do high-profile cases like Ferguson, and use the leverage from those cases to try to spread the good practices that come out of those cases to other jurisdictions.

But I think it`s important for the Department of Justice to put more resources into this area, and to come up with a targeted enforcement program that will identify jurisdictions that are likely to have problems.

HAYES: William Yeomans, thank you very much. Really appreciate it.

YEOMANS: My pleasure.

HAYES: All right. How is today`s King versus Burwell, the Obamacare case before the Supreme Court, like Bush v. Gore? We`ll tell you, ahead.

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HAYES: A terrifying scene in Seoul today, where the U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Korean was attacked while giving a lecture. According to South Korea police and media, Ambassador Mark Lippert was wounded by a man with a knife who was screaming, quote, "South and North Korea should be reunified."

That man has been arrested and according to police, he is known and has a record in 2010, he threw a stone at the Japanese ambassador. Ambassador Lippert`s injuries are reportedly not life-threatening. He is treated at a local hospital. The White House says President Obama called the ambassador tonight to wish him a speedy recovery.

Back in a moment.

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HAYES: All right. So, today was argument today at the Supreme Court, which is always a big day. And today was a very big argument on Obamacare. And to me, the details of it which we`re going to get to in a little bit are less important than what this means for the court.

This is, I think, the biggest test of the court`s integrity since another big court case, Bush v. Gore back in 2000. You`ll recall, of course, as the nation watched, wrapped, wanting to know what the recount would be in Florida. The court stepped in in 2000, and they basically, well, they awarded the presidency to George W. Bush. And they did it by the slimmest of margins, 5-4, with the five conservative justices basically stopping a recount and declaring George W. Bush president of the United States.

The reason that that decision was so frustrating, and the reason it hurt the court`s credibility and was so damaging is that the rationale those conservative justices used to do that was manifestly in opposition to things they`ve been saying their entire career. And they even put something in the opinion that was a kind of white flag, where they said basically we`re making up here, we`re hacked.

They said this, "Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities."

What that means in plain English is, we are ruling this way on this case, so George W. Bush can be president, but please never cite our logic here again, because we don`t agree with our own logic. Now, fast forward to today, King versus Burwell before the Supreme Court, a challenge to the Obamacare law, the second biggest one, and this one on whether states can pay subsidies to people on the exchanges if they did not make their own exchanges themselves.

Now, here`s the thing, like Bush v. Gore, if the conservative justices on the court follow their own logic, the things they`ve been saying forever, the precedence the court has stood, this never should have come within 100 miles of the Supreme Court. This entire case was reverse-engineered by people who hate the law in an act of tremendous and historical bad faith to destroy it over a slightly ambiguous provision of the statute. And yet here we are in front of the court.

And so the question is, does the court basically say, yes, we hate Obamacare, and we`re going to knock it down, or gut it because we don`t like it, or do they stick to the law?

I mean, Linda Greenhouse (ph), who is not a fire-breathing radical, she covered the court for years in "The New York Times", she wrote this piece. She basically said, "To reject the government`s defense of the law, the justices would have to suspend their own settled approach to statutory interpretation as well as their own often stated view of how Congress should act towards the states."

In other words, they would have to pull another Bush v. Gore. They would have to take all their previous legal rationale and throw it out the window and basically say, we hate Obamacare and you`re going to have to deal with it.

Now, the question is, based on oral arguments today, what are they going to do?

NINA TOTENBERG, NPR LEGAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: I disavow all connection with everything you just said.

HAYES: Yes, that was -- let`s just say, that was a slightly more partisan and ideological take on this than the great Totenberg, who is highly judicious and neutral in all these affairs would say. But I am curious your sense today in that room, where the justices were on this case.

TOTENBERG: Well, you really couldn`t tell in some ways, because we had four of the more liberal members of the court who clearly were saying, Congress wrote a law that was quite deliberate in its purpose, and you`ve cherry-picked out a few words, challengers, that do not represent what the law said. So, those are four votes for the Obama administration`s interpretation of the law.

Then, there were two conservative justices, Scalia and Alito, who pretty clearly agreed with the challengers. And I think we can probably assume Justice Thomas, who didn`t say anything, will agree with them.

Then, the chief justice said barely anything. And Justice Kennedy was left to sort of indicate that he has -- he`s more inclined perhaps to side with the administration`s viewpoint than the challenger`s viewpoint, and I`ll explain why in a minute, but he wasn`t certain at all. It was a sort of hamlet-like performance.

And so, I always say that you`re a fool to make a prediction in most of these cases, especially a big case like this. And everybody who made a prediction that Obamacare would be struck down as unconstitutional lived to rue the day. And I`m not about to make a prediction the other way just because there were a few tee leaves that would suggest that the Obama administration might prevail.

HAYES: Right. So, that`s a great example. Of course, the last Affordable Care Act challenge, a lot of people thought there`s no way this thing`s getting upheld. Of course, it was upheld. Roberts voting to uphold it in a way that surprised a lot of people, even when the opinion came out famously.

But here`s my question to you: how much do you think, as someone who`s covered the court for a long time, knows the court as well as anybody else, how much do the reputation of the players work on the justices? They say their empires, balls and strikes, we just look at the law.

But they`re not. They are political actors. They understand where they stand in relation to things, that they create some huge, you know, nets for 9 million people, like that`s going to be a problem.

How much does that weigh on them?

TOTENBERG: Well, I think the chief justice and a number of other members of the court have been very strong desire to protect the court as an institution, and to protect its capital.

HAYES: Yes.

TOTENBERG: And if you go completely off the reservation, you do not protect its capital.

And, therefore, I think the chief justice, because he`s chief, has to consider that, even more than other people. But that`s sort of his personal inclination anyway. And what is really interesting in some ways is you look at this, is that, you know, Justice Scalia who is an amazing legal mind, and wrote a tome this thick about statutory, and all briefs cited his brief from that tome, and what that tome says is, you don`t look at just a few words out of context, you look at the overall purpose of the act.

And the sense I got today was that the solicitor general, Don Verrilli, representing the Obama administration was pretty forceful in making the case that the overall purpose of the act was to say to the states, look, you can make these exchanges if you want, and if you don`t want to, we`ll do it instead.

HAYES: Right. And a lot of people quoting Scalia back to him today. It was pretty funny.

Nina Totenberg, thank you very much.

TOTENBERG: Thank you.

HAYES: There`s a new metric for deciding who among the possible Republican 2016 contenders is the strongest on foreign relations and that is how hard they clap. I`ll explain, next.

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HAYES: On Twitter today, a reminder I saw that in North Korea, citizens who didn`t cry enough at the public funeral of Kim Jong-Il, who didn`t seem to be genuinely mourning the dear leader, were reportedly sentenced to six months hard labor for their lack of appropriate mourning.

Now that story first came out in 2012, but the reason it resurfaced today is because of this.

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HAYES: That was Senator Rand Paul applauding as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wrapped up his speech to congress yesterday. And, according to some in the right-wing media, Senator Paul was not clapping hard enough.

"Unenthused Rand Paul Lifelessly Applauds Netanyahu`s Speech", says the Nation Review, which also made a handy GIF of the moment.

And Washington Post blogger, Jennifer Rubin, famous for boosting Mitt Romney and for her well documented dislike of Rand Paul, seized on the report tweeting, "Unenthusized Ran Paul Lifelessly Applauds Bibi. OOps.. almost like he`s been faking his support for Isreal until now.

And this morning, Fox asked Senator Paul himself about it.

UNIDENTIFEID MALE: We have some of your reaction during the speech and you look less than thrilled hearing the speech.

What were you thinking?

SEN. RAN PAUL, (R) KENTUCKY: You know, I think what`s funny about it is is that you have these gossipy websites who really just demean themselves by putting stuff like out.

I gave the Prime Minister 50 standing ovations. I co-sponsored bringing him here. An on the day that I also decide to co-sponsor the Corker bill that says any final deal has to be approved, we have gossipy websites looking up at, you know, the metric of how fast you clap.

I think they demean themselves by putting that out.

HAYES: And so it has come to this, America. Foreign policy politics in the Republican primary are coming down to whether a potential candidate claps enthusiastically enough when applauding a foreign leader.

And, if that`s the case, then perhaps next time, as Philip Bump points out in the Washington Post, Senator Paul should take a cue on enthusiasm from his dad.

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HAYES: When it comes to any alleged scandal involving Bill and/or Hillary Clinton, there are always, always two stories.

And the first involves the actual issue at hand and the facts surrounding them.

In this case, yesterday`s New York Times scoop that "Hillary Clinton exclusively used a personal e-mail account to conduct government business as secretary of state". Clinton did not take steps to have her official e-mails preserved in realtime by the state department in an apparent violation of regulations that have been in place since 2009.

And while she turned 55,000 pages of e-mails over to the state department two months ago, it was left up to Clinton`s advisers which of those e-mails to release and which to hold back, raising significant transparency concerns.

We learned from the AP today that Clinton was running her own e-mail server, registered under her home address in New York, which may not have been secure from hackers, and that despite her spokesman`s statement that Clinton had, quote, "every expectation that her e-mails would be retained because she was emailing State Department employees on their department account, at least one top Clinton aide, Huma Abedine appears to have used the same @Clinton email address that Clinton had set up for herself.

Okay. So, Hillary Clinton was also, we should note, not alone in using personal e-mail for government business.

Jeb Bush, who she could face in the Presidential general election next year, used a personal e-mail address as Florida governor. And, like Clinton, Bush owns the server that runs his personal email address.

Republican representative Jason Chaffetz, who`s House oversight and government reform committee is planning to investigate Clinton`s email use, has an official House business card that lists a Gmail address.

We blacked it out, which is nice of us.

And that brings us to another new development, which speaks to the other story you always have to discuss whenever the latest Clinton quote "scandal" comes along.

For more than two decades, nearly uninterrupted, Bill and Hillary Clinton have been, quote unquote, at the center of scandal.

Some of those have raised real and significant questions. Others were pretty clearly drummed up and ridiculous. But all of them are part of one big alleged scandal that runs off into tributaries only later to return back to the mighty main river.

Case in point, Benghazi, which GOP lawmakers have tried over and over to use to destroy Hillary Clinton, and despite multiple investigations, flat-out refusing-- refuting the most damaging allegations.

But, no matter how often those claims were debunked, GOP kept digging.

Today, the latest house committee investigating Benghazi, chaired by representative Trey Gowdy, issued subpoenas for Clinton`s e-mails, as part of the ongoing effort to find a scandal that will stick.

And that gets to the fundamental dynamics.

You have, on one side, the Clintons and their team, who are justifiably paranoid that people are out to get them, and who, perhaps as a result, tend to act in ways that appear shady and evasive and nontransparent.

And then people on the other side, the ones who are going after them, point to that behavior as evidence that the Clintons are just as guilty as they always thought.

Jonathan, I`ll start with you. So, okay, why do they do this? You wrote about Hillary Clinton`s time at state. Did you know about this? Was this commonly known and why do you think they did it?

JONATHAN ALLEN, BLOOMBERG NEWS: I don`t think it was commonly known that she didn`t have a state department e-mail address.

I think it`s commonly known, fairly commonly known, that she e-mails with a wide range of people about a wide range of subjects, many of which wouldn`t be considered government business, so it`s not surprising she has a personal account.

But, to your point in your opening there, Chris, just because they`re paranoid doesn`t mean people aren`t out to get them.

And I think that that`s what you`re seeing here.

It`s hard to know the chicken or the egg, which made which happen first, but clearly there was an effort here to evade at least the spirit of the open records laws and rules.

This is a situation where Hillary Clinton didn`t want her e-mail to be available to anybody else without her permission and also wanted to be able to take her documents with her from the state department. And, you know, most state department aides, former state department aides, you ask them for their e-mails with Hillary Clinton, and then they say I can`t give them to you, because I no longer have access to my state department e-mail, which is what happens when they leave office.

But she, with this private server, now has all those documents.

And, of course, the result of this, we`re going to see a big tussle over whether she has to turn those over to congress.

HAYES: Well, so today we got the Trey Gowdy, you know, subpoenas. Which was inevitable. And, if I were Trey Gowdy, this is way off. I mean, of course, you do it.

Are we now at the moment, everybody remember Kenneth Starr didn`t start about Monica Lewinsky, right? It started about, I guess it started off with -- did it start off Whitewater or did it start off Paula Jones, and then it went, you know, like the river ran through a bunch of different things.

This, to me, feels like, oh, we`re now at the point where the Benghazi committee becomes the e-mail committee.

MCKAY COPPINS, BUZZFEED NEWS: Right. Well, I mean, I actually, like you said, I think that like, this is the obvious starting point for Republicans, right? Like, we know that for the next year and a half, these e-mails are going to be central to how Republicans talk about Hillary Clinton, how the deal with her tenure at the state department.

The obvious starting point is they have this Benghazi committee that`s already there, that`s looking for pieces of evidence that support their view of how this was scandalous.

So of course, let`s, you know, let`s do this, let`s do the subpoena.

The question now is going to be, yeah, who knows what the Benghazi committee specifically will focus on going forward, but certainly, I don`t think we`re going to hear Republicans over the next year and a half keep banging the drum on Benghazi. They`re going to be talking about the e-mails.

And every time a new allegation comes up with Hillary Clinton, how she handled one thing or another, the question is always going to be -- well who knows what`s in these e-mails that we never got. They could, they could you know support our entire theory of the case.

HAYES: Talk to me, Jonathan, about the sociology of the people in Clinton world.

Because this to me is such a perfect example of a group of people who were born into crisis, and basically live in the bunker. Like, they`re all just used to being in the bunker. Like, people are trying to destroy us, and we must act as if people are trying to destroy us or they will succeed in destroying us.

ALLEN: That`s right, never give an inch, Chris.

These people were born into that culture, the folks around the Clintons, most of the older generation of Clinton aides has moved on. Some of them are still around. But, the next generation just grows up in it.

And look, they`re absolutely --. They`re absolutely secretive. They absolutely want to fight over everything. And they want to sort of muck every issue up.

And so, you know, that`s what we`re going to see.

HAYES: Philippe Reines, who is sort of famous, right? He is a famous person in that world. A very, extremely smart, charismatic guy, has been working with the Clintons for a long time. He`s sort of Hillary`s press person.

And, he today, this amazing thing happened in which this story is going on and he just picks a fight with, like nine different reporters.

He keeps CCing more and more of them, on the record.

COPPINS: Including my editor in chief.

HAYES: Including your editor in chief. Who, actually he got, right? Because Ben said something which he had to retract, right? Which was, just a little bit of a window into this, right? Where he basically makes a factual case.

His point was, if you think we set this up to avoid FOIA requests, which is what Gawker has alleged, you`re absolutely out of your mind. That`s crazy. We would, of course, never do that.

And, he actually is persuasive, I think,in certain ways in that thread.

But aside from the persuasiveness on the substance, is just the idea of, like, the shear kind of like, brawling bravado of this exchange is a remarkable thing.

COPPINS: Ben forwarded me that e-mail exchange, before it went public, but as it was happening.

I was just reading through it, and I just kept thinking like, it is amazing that Philippe and, in general, the Clinton circle feels when they`re under siege in a moment like this, where they clearly -- there are serious allegations being brought and they know that this is serious -- that their reactionis, let`s start a huge brawl, with tons of different reporters, and just like blow up the blogosphere and Twittersphere with this.

And I think, you know their is certainly a case to be made that it`s, it`s pretty savvy, right? Like, if you turn everything into a huge fight, people have to pick sides, right?

HAYES: Yes, but the other thing, John, and I said this to McKay earlier in the green room, I feel like with anything having to do with the Clintons it`s like the visual effect, with, like, you can see the old woman or the young woman depending how you, like, squint your eyes.

Which is like, I honestly, I genuinely often -- like on this case, there`s part of me that thinks, yeah, well there`s a really serious transparency issues, and there`s part of me that thinks like, if it`s just like one of the, is this basically like this year`s version of cattle futures? Remember cattle futures?Like, travelgate? The hair cut?

I can sit here for an hour and like, I was doing this in a meeting, and our staff, who are not old enough, had no idea what the heck I was talking about.

But like, that`s the thing is like, it`s very hard with the Clintons to have any sense of proportion between the trivial and actually important.

ALLEN: It`s like being very inebriated and trying to stick an arm or leg off the bed to, like, balance yourself and trying to figure out what`s up and what`s down. I haven`t experienced that ever, but--

HAYES: We get the idea, yeah.

ALLEN: But as far as Philippe being savvy, i think what he did today is incredibly savvy because we`re spending a fair amount of the time talking about the email exchanges, we`re talking about Philippe and not talking about Hillary Clinton.

So he throws himself on a grenade. You would say there`s a method to the madness, because clearly the e-mail exchanges with him are fairly odd.

But, in addition to that, you have all these reporters who are either on the e-mail exchanges with him or watching this play out on blogs and, you know, and on the internet and not actually doing the job of investigating the e-mails.

HAYES: Final thought I`ll say here,

As a journalist, here`s what i want to know, why`d you set up this whole system? Just tell us. Like, that`s the thing, right? What`s the motivation? Why`d you set up the system? You`re going to get a state.gov. Like, that`s what we need to hear.

COPPINS: Well and the fact that they haven`t answered that question, I assume that there are probably legal issues that they have -- that they`re working on. But that`s important.

HAYES: McKay Coppins, Jonathan Allen, thanks to you both.

All right. The results of months of media beating the drums of war against ISIS, ahead.

ANNOUNCER: Martin O`Malley. He is the former governor of Maryland which makes him officially a Washington outsider. The inspiration for the character Tommy Carkedy on The Wire.

It`s Martin O`Malley.

HAYES: Hometown boy. You know him.

STEELE: Yes, I do.

HAYES: You were -- governor of the state that he was the governor of.

This is nice.

STEELE: Yeah, I am left speechless.

HAYES: Oh, that`s right America, it`s time for yet another update to our All In Fantasy 2016 Candidate Draft.

Because Martin O`Malley said this yesterday.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARTIN O`MALLEY, FORMER GOVERNOR OF MARYLAND: I`m very seriously considering running in 2016.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: So, no points for anyone yet, but boy things are getting hot.

We`ll continue to monitor all the latest developments to see how our players fare with the draft picks as the race for 2016 heats up. For now, you can check in on everybody`s picks and draft scoring system, where? At our Facebook page, face.com/allinwithchris. You know, that page that you just liked.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HAYES: Today a stunning new poll shows a result of more than six months of beating the drums for war against ISIS.

It`s a testament to the effectiveness of ISIS`s own monstrous brutality and its slick propaganda machine. The endless loop of ISIS imagery playing on TV screens across the country. And the increasing calls from politicians and commentators for a full-on reinvasion of Iraq and even Syria to vanquish the militant group.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN, (R) ARIZONA: We`re going to have to put boots on the ground, my friend, and we`re going to have to do a lot more things than we`re doing now.

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM, (R) SOUTH CAROLINA: You`re going to need boots onthe ground, not only in Iraq, but Syria.

GOV. BOBBI JINDAL, (R) LOUISIANA: Remove the ban on ground troops, tell the political left we want our military leaders to do whatever it takes.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president should have the authority, he does have the authority, to use all the force he wants.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: A new Quinnipiac poll shows that 62 percent of Americans now support sending ground troops to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria, majorities of both men and women at 68 and 57 percent respectively, and that is a massive jump since Quinnipiace last polled on this in November when just 37 favored sending in ground troops.

Think about that, from 37 percent to 62 percent in just over three months. There`s evidence that the kind of images we see on TV and online may have a lot to do with it. A 2006 experiment, later published in peer-reviewed journal Politics, showed two groups of people the same TV news item about terrorism, one with neutral visuals and one with terrifying visuals like the burning World Trade Center on 9/11. According to the study`s author, quote, "respondents who saw the news item with scary visuals were more likely than those who watched the version with nonemotional imagery to support military solutions to international problems."

Now, this is something we grapple with right here on this show every day. In fact, we had a conversation about it earlier today before this segment. We can`t avoid these images altogether, we have to show you something. But where is the line between showing you the story and straight-up fearmongering?

There seems right now to be a palpable turn towards darkness and fear in the American political psyche, as the poll today reflects, fed not only by imagery, but by a steady diet of maximalist rhetoric about Nazi level threats whether from the murderers of ISIS beheading Americans and slaughtering religious minorities, or from the evil regime in Iran calling for death for America and the annihilation of Israel.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, PRIME MINISTER OF ISRAEL: Iran and ISIS are competing for the crown of militant Islam. One calls itself the Islamic Republic, the other calls itself the Islamic State, both want to impose a militant Islamic empire, first in the region and then on the entire world. They just disagree among themselves who will be the ruler of that empire.

So when it comes to IUran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: If all this feels uncomfortably similar to the run-up to the last war in Iraq, it`s because we`re hearing from many of the same voices who sounded the alarm last time.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

NETANYAHU: If you take out Saddam, Saddam`s regime, I guarantee you, that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others will say the time of such regimes, of despots is gone.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HAYES: Joining me now, someone who learned lesson of the last war in Iraq, Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Collin Powell.

Colonel, does it feel to you the way it does to me, that we are entering as a nation, as a sort of polity into -- of psychological place uncomfortably similar to what led to that first Iraq war, second Iraq war?

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FRM. AIDE TO COLONEL POWELL: Yes, it does, Chris. And I want to say that if the polls show 62 percent of Americans want to use ground forces against ISIS in Syria or Iraq or whatever, then I suggest we have a draft and draft those 62 percent to lead the way.

HAYES: I absolutely agree with you that part of that 62 percent is borne of the fact that a smaller and smaller percentage of Americans bear a greater and greater share of the actual fighting.

WILKERSON: Absolutely the case. And we`re seeing what that`s doing to that smaller percentage, and the fact that we have such a high suicide rate and post-traumatic stress rate and so forth and so on.

We have got to -- if we want to succumb to these fears, and I agree with the way you characterized it, it is a state of fear that we`ve created for ourselves, and I must say the media has exacerbated majorly, if we want to deal with that in the way that that 62 percent wants to deal with it, then let`s have the draft back.

HAYES: The other thing that I -- that is striking to me is, I thought we learned back as we watched Iraq develop, and even Afghanistan, right, which was a far more justified enterprise in certain ways than Iraq, to ask the question of what happens when we win, what happens afterwards, what happens the next day. And yet here we are back talking about vanquishing ISIS with it seems to me no one asking that question.

WILKERSON: I agree with you.

And let`s just look at Mr. Putin for a moment, to change the subject, but not to change the subject. Mr. Putin went to school on the Russian experience in Afghanistan. He went to school on the Russian experience in Chechnya. And he watched very closely the U.S. experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, and look what he`s doing, he`s taking up guerrilla warfare in Ukraine, that`s the kind of warfare that wins, that`s the kind of warfare that Putin`s now taking up.

We do not need to get into this as a conventional force on the ground in a region where we`ve already been handed, really handed our rear ends. We don`t need anymore.

HAYES: Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, we don`t need anymore, as good a summation of that as anything. Thank you very much, sir, I always appreciate it.

WILDERSON: Thanks for having me, Chris.

HAYES: That is All In for this evening. The Rachel Maddow Show starts now.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.END

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